From 3 R's to 3 C's: corporate curriculum and culture in public schools.

• Date: 22 September 2005
• Author: Mahiri, Jabari
• Published date: 22 September 2005
• Author: Mahiri, Jabari

THE WAR ON PUBLIC EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES IS ONE FRONT OF A LARGER war for world domination. The objectives and issues that form the battle lines domestically are intricately linked, and must be understood as local expressions of the logic (or illogic) of a U.S. quest for global empire. A key objective for public education that increasingly serves poor, working-class, and ethnically diverse students is the institution of highly scripted curriculums as the foundation for all teaching and learning. Scripted curriculums are designed by textbook corporations and are primarily aimed at preparing students for standardized tests. Rice (2004) notes that their formulas for success seem to treat all learners alike, while also having the effect of deskilling teachers who become "simple deliverers of content." These textbook corporations play collateral roles on the home front to the multinational corporations that wage ideological and economic warfare abroad. The consistent motive is to maximize profits.

A potent aspect of this quest is the current extent of collusion between corporations, banks, and governments, which Perkins (2004) calls the corporatocracy. He confessed his role for several decades as an "economic hit man" in duping leaders of developing countries to support U.S. commercial and political interests, in part by entrapping them in a web of debt to ensure their loyalty. Korten (2001) terms this process "predatory financing." To be completely successful, however, empires also require pacification and acceptance of their objectives at home. I argue that textbook corporations that promote scripted curriculums linked to standardized tests ultimately contribute to this process. However, teachers, students, parents, and community members are entrenched and fighting this form of corporate takeover and control of public schools. This article chronicles the struggle of one such group in a public school district in Northern California.

A Fight to Read Books

From January to June of 2005, I conducted research on an exemplary teaching practice taking place at El Cerrito High School in the West Contra Costa Unified School District. This district includes a number of municipalities, edge cities (Garreau, 1992), in Northern California with one or more high schools. I used the actual names of principal places and players in this article because they have already been identified in published newspaper articles, public documents, and television broadcasts of school board meetings.

Joan Cone, who has taught high school English for 40 years, was the focal teacher in this site, one of several around the country in which I was researching exemplary teaching. She has been an exceptionally effective and reflective English teacher, and has contributed to the profession by publishing articles on different aspects of her practice in a variety of educational journals, including the Harvard Educational Review. She is well known in the field for her original work on de-tracking, block scheduling, and the successful teaching of reading, writing, and literature to diverse students. These loci are linked to her goals of providing equitable, challenging, and culturally responsive learning experiences and resources to attain high achievement for all students. Late in her career, she returned to graduate school and completed a Ph.D. in education at the University of California, Berkeley.

Shortly after beginning my observations in Dr. Cone's ninth grade literature class, talk began to circulate around the district about the school board's decision on February 9, 2005, to adopt a Prentice Hall-designed literature curriculum for high school English classes in grades nine to eleven. This was a key event that framed this struggle. Other key events were the e-mail correspondence of February 4, which analyzed the Prentice Hall curriculum, a February 5 letter to the school board, which requested that the curriculum not be adopted, meetings on April 5, 12, and 24 to organize resistance to the curriculum's adoption, a memo dated April 28 from district administrators that set guidelines for using the Prentice Hall curriculum, the May 18 board meeting, and a May 25 e-mail to the dean of U.C. Berkeley's School of Education.

Rationales by the school district's top administrators directly linked the school board's decision to adopt the Prentice Hall curriculum to improving student scores on standardized tests. As the agenda for the May 18, 2005, board meeting noted:

Academic Performance Indices (API) from 1999 to 2004 based on high stakes tests such as the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) and the California Standards Test (CST) indicate that our high school students are not achieving to their potential. In fact, only one high school, Middle College High, is scoring over 700 (API 811). Four of our comprehensive high schools are scoring below 600 (De Anza, El Cerrito, Kennedy, and Richmond). Pinole Valley High scored 604 in 2004. While most of our schools have made improvement over this period of time, for example Richmond High has increased their API by 124 points, the overall results indicate that our students have not been receiving instruction in the knowledge and skills measured by these exams. Ultimately, the May 18 meeting became a forum in which the struggle by teachers, students, parents, and community members against the imposition of the Prentice Hall curriculum took center stage. The group they formed was the Alliance for Meaningful Education, and they did extensive organizing before and after this pivotal school board meeting. Dr. Cone and her colleague, fellow El Cerrito High English teacher Paula Gocker, were key leaders of the Alliance. I attended the meetings and closely followed its activities to apprehend this side of Dr. Cone's work as an exemplary educator. On April 5, 2005, the Alliance called a meeting of the district's English department chairs, but parents, a few students, and other teachers also attended--about 20 people in all.

Dr. Cone led this meeting, which began at 7:15 p.m. and took place in a mobile classroom on the ECHS campus. "Basically," she started, "what we want to do at this meeting is to get organized. We need to educate all the teachers in the schools. We need to get to all the secondary schools." One of the parents present offered the following critique of the Prentice Hall curriculum:

Prentice Hall ... has some good stuff in it and some bad. The vocabulary is low level. The curriculum is scripted. It is all related to the standardized tests. It is Open Court for high school. [Open Court is a scripted curriculum at the elementary level that was adopted for use throughout the nearby Oakland Unified School District.] The most rigorous option has only two novels for the whole year. They [the school board] assumed that the anthology from Prentice Hall would be a supplement to the rest of the curriculum. When teachers asked [the school district's administrators] if students would read whole books, the answer was no. It was clear that the scope, sequencing, and pacing of the Prentice Hall curriculum did not incorporate significant reading of whole books.

Top school district administrators tried to further clarify the use of the Prentice Hall curriculum in an April 28, 2005, bulletin to secondary principals and English teachers. This bulletin directed that teachers must choose one of two options:

Option I--Use Prentice Hall as the primary source of readings and language arts work following the publisher's recommended sequence of themes. Option II--Resequence Prentice Hall selections to match Parallel Curriculum themes with options for approved supplementary literary works to account for up to 20% of the readings. This option assumes an equivalent/proportionate focus on English/Language Arts standards as framed by California English/Language Arts standards blueprint. The Alliance recognized that both options involving the Prentice Hall anthologized textbooks precluded substantive reading of whole books, and this became their rallying call. As Alliance resistance to the imposition of this corporate curriculum shifted into high gear, I became much like an embedded reporter in this local movement. E-mail networks formed, more meetings were held, information packets went out to the media, and group readings of books such as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 were organized to take place at school board meetings and on the campus in front of El Cerrito High School before classes began. El Cerrito students also wrote letters to the school board exclaiming their joy in reading whole books and imploring it to reconsider the way in which district administrators were implementing the Prentice Hall curriculum. I received copies of letters from over 40 students, which read pretty much like the following excerpt by Danielle Barnes:

One of my favorite things about English class is our book discussions--a time when I am able to express my thoughts and feelings about the characters in the book and their journeys, and also a time for my mind to be opened to different perspectives on the same stories--allowing me to think more broadly and deeply about the book. Limiting a curriculum to excerpts is an awful idea.... The United States is always complaining about the illiteracy of its citizens. How will taking away whole books from a classroom help? Corporations and Curriculum

Before expanding the depiction and discussion of this local resistance movement's opposition to a corporate curriculum, I will review the work of a number of scholars to offer more detail on the character of corporations as motive forces in economic, political, and social events in this country and around the world. Considerations of the national and global character and motives of corporations will situate and illuminate the significance of moves toward a corporate curriculum in this local site.

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